NYTimes: For Lesser Crimes, Rethinking Life Behind Bars

No real Capital Region connection here, but there was an interesting piece in yesterday’s New York Times on rethinking how our country hands out lifetime prison sentences for nonviolent offenders that I thought some of our Crime Confidential regulars might like to read.

Check out the story here (It’s long, but worth the time, in my opinion). Some of the more interesting statistics in the article:

“Most other countries do not impose life sentences without parole, and those that do generally reserve it for a few heinous crimes. In England, where it is used only for homicides involving an aggravating factor like child abduction, torture or terrorism, a recent study reported that 41 prisoners were serving life terms without parole. In the United States, some 41,000 are.”

“The United States has the highest reported rate of incarceration of any country: about one in 100 adults, a total of nearly 2.3 million people in prison or jail.”

“Half a million people are now in prison or jail for drug offenses, about 10 times the number in 1980, and there have been especially sharp increases in incarceration rates for women and for people over 55, long past the peak age for violent crime.”

“In all, about 1.3 million people, more than half of those behind bars, are in prison or jail for nonviolent offenses.”

“Nationally, about one in 40 children have a parent in prison. Among black children, one in 15 have a parent in prison.”

“…the United States, with less than 5 percent of the world’s population, still has nearly a quarter of the world’s prisoners.”